The “Key” in “The People’s Key,” the title of the latest album by Nebraska-based indie rockers Bright Eyes, refers to G major (because it’s easy to play and many popular songs are written in it). But for which people did Conor Oberst and company make this album?

Not for everyone, certainly. The album’s ten tracks are interspersed with recordings of the schizophrenic rambling of a man who is either homeless or possibly a theoretical physicist, suggesting that we’re dealing with real, serious issues here (in music, nothing is more “real” than a homeless person).

In contrast, the music itself is largely upbeat, accentuated with airy guitar flourishes, a driving drum beat and pulsating synths. The only discouraging aspect of the music is Oberst’s voice, which is flush with reverb and manages to sound melancholy and distant amidst even the most uplifting instrumentals.

It’s important to note here that Oberst is one of those remarkable musicians from whom music seems to constantly spring forth. He’s amassed such a collection of side groups, supergroups and solo albums it’s hard to imagine how his fans keep track of it all. They must manage in some way, however, because through his career he’s developed a sizable following and a significant amount of critical acclaim. As an example, 2007’s “Cassadaga,” the most recent Bright Eyes release prior to “The People’s Key,” debuted at number four on the U.S. Billboard 200 and Rolling Stone named Oberst its “Best Songwriter of 2008.”

“Why can’t Conor Oberst just be happy already?” (Photo via jking89)

Thus, fans already well acquainted with Oberst will know what they’re getting into with this release, and they’ll probably like it just fine. For everyone else, this album will feel a lot like trying to eat an entire pie in one sitting: you can’t get enough of it at first, but soon you start losing interest until eventually you leave it unfinished, vowing never to touch it again (and probably feeling a little depressed afterward).

The 30-year-old frontman sings like he wants to be happy but doesn’t know how, and this struggle is the album’s most interesting feature. “Shell Games,” the standout track on “The People’s Key,” is the best example of Oberst’s vocals sparring with his bandmate’s instruments, but the track alone isn’t enough to save an album that is generally so cliché it may as well be a caricature of indie music.

This is a plateau. It’s difficult to judge how catatonic it’s being at the moment. (Photo via Wonderlane)

Folksy guitar riffs? Check. Backing singers who “ooh and ahh” and harmonize during the choruses? Check. Soft, vaguely tribal drumming during the slower tracks? Check. Lyrics with big words and complex metaphors (comparing the mind to “a catatonic plateau,” for example)? So indie.

Clearly, then, this is music for intellectuals: the college students and coffee-shop dwellers who make up the “indie scene.” But aside from a surprising and welcome bit of double-bass drumming during “Jejune Stars,” these songs pass like clockwork, pleasant enough but never ascending to anything particularly memorable. Bright Eyes may have made “The People’s Key” for smart people, but the smartest would do well to look for more musically ambitious material elsewhere.

It takes a lot to offend me, and much more to offend me as a man. You gotta hit just the right nerve. To date, only two works of art have ever done it. Both were seriocomic indie films about American families. The first was Juno. The second, I’m afraid, is The Kids Are All Right. I say “afraid” for two reasons: 1) Unlike Juno, The Kid Are All Right is a terrific film until the offending turn, and 2) my feelings for it remain murky, uncertain. I’m not sure if it’s saying what I think it’s saying. I hope I’m wrong, but something (perhaps my own righteousness) tells me I’m not. In short, I read both films as saying roughly the same thing: Life’s messy, and it gets a whole lot messier when we stray from the confines of the family unit. What follows is a personal, spoiler-studded take on the two films.

Let’s start with Juno, a film I’ve written about before. That movie rattled me enough that I felt compelled to create a MySpace account for the sole purpose of messaging Diablo Cody. She never replied. I didn’t expect her to. I wrote the message, foremost, for myself. Something about the film upset me, and I needed an excuse to organize my thoughts. Why did this feel-good indie comedy leave me so unsettled? It wasn’t the quirkistan dialogue, nor was it some underlying sense of feeling pandered to by the film’s hyper-hipster aesthetic. Those things mildly annoyed me; they didn’t unnerve me. I kept coming back to variations of the same question: How does the film feel — and how am I supposed to feel — about Jason Bateman‘s character?

Here’re some snippets of what I wrote to Cody:

Bateman is out of his element in the family-oriented suburbs, and it takes the idea (or the threat) of a kid to make this hit him on a visceral level. Suddenly, with the notion of an adopted child, he realizes he can’t fake it anymore; he can’t pretend to enjoy where he is and what he does. What’s more, he shouldn’t, for the sake of his soon-to-be child. So he makes a decision before they adopt the baby, to avoid the fiasco of divorce with children…

The film defines what is socially acceptable and what is not; clearly wanting to pursue a career in the city and not having a child at Bateman’s age is unacceptable to you. Why else would you kick his character to the curb once he makes [his] decision, excluding him from the rest of the film? Why else would you give [Jennifer] Garner a number of lines mocking his lifestyle (“your shirt is stupid”) and not afford Bateman the same?…Why else would you associate his desires with pedophilia, as if to imply that his unbridled selfishness will invariably lead down a path of big-city hedonism and immorality?

That last one’s the real kicker. Part of me doesn’t want to believe that, in the otherwise effective slow-dance scene between Bateman and [Ellen] Page, you were suggesting that Bateman was coming on to her…But, again, why else would the scene begin with Bateman watching Page out of his window with a lecherous grin? Why else would he get defensive and ask her why she visits him so often?…

I’ve used this “why else” construction because I know there are possible answers to these questions I just haven’t thought of…

But the pattern remains, and so does my question: Why were you so hostile to this character? Because he realized he didn’t want to adopt a child and have a proper family? Becuase his version of avoiding normalcy isn’t cute and innocent like Ellen Page and Michael Cera’s? Or, rather, that avoiding normalcy is all fine and well at their age, but a man Bateman’s age needs to settle down and begin acting like a proper man — a father?

Is that really what you’re saying?

OK, so I was flustered. My defenses tend to erupt when I feel like someone — be they filmmaker or friend — makes value judgements defining acceptable social behavior. I’m a lover of Claude Chabrol and Luis Bunuel: Filmmakers who tear down such constructions, revealing their often arbitrary (and ideological) nature. Like them, I’m not anti-family. I’m anti-family-is-the-only-option. I’m against imposing definitions of normalcy on people. I recoil when others do so. Something innate in me believes people have the right to lead their lives as they choose (to the extent that they don’t harm others in the process, of course). It’s not my place to judge behavior through the prism of my own personal beliefs, no matter how tempting. I’m what you call a social liberal.

So I resent filmmakers who use the medium to codify normal and abnormal behavior. Cinema has the unique ability to do this. No other art form can mimic our world in all its sound and vision. The medium can give glimpses of a better world with remarkable verisimilitude. But it can also impose a dogmatic vision of right and wrong, morality and immorality. It can harden the status quo. In Juno, the evidence suggested to me that Cody punished her character for not wanting to settle down with a wife and child in the suburbs. Again, I have nothing against settling down with a wife and child in the suburbs. Some of my favorite people on earth fit that description. What I’m against is defining this specific life path as normal, natural, and inevitable. Such definitions imply that those who choose an alternate path are abnormal, immoral (as in Juno), or simply delaying the inevitable (as in The Kids Are All Right).

Cody’s script mocks Bateman’s cool-guy persona as immature. In doing so, it defines adult male maturity (a father with a job he hates) and immaturity (not that). It places a severe value judgement on Bateman’s decision to seek a divorce. The film conflates this decision with an unforgivable moment implying that he wants to have sex with a pregnant 16-year-old. This scene, the aforementioned slow-dance, ranks among the most maddening movie moments I’ve ever witnessed. It confirms the conservative idea that some relationships just aren’t proper. Among the lessons I learned from Juno: A teenage girl shouldn’t befriend an adult male, because there’s always the chance he might make a left-field pass at her. The film, in short, deems their friendship inappropriate. It also associates Bateman’s wish to leave the marriage with aberrant sexuality. Men like Bateman, the film tells us, don’t have self-control. Not only can they not hold down a marriage, hell, they’ll even put the moves onpregnant 16-year-olds.

It doesn’t take long to spot the parallels between Bateman in Juno and Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right. Both films go out of their way to make the men look, for lack of a better word, cool. Bateman digs Sonic Youth and obscure gore movies. He wears hipster shirts. He plays music. He likes and does the things young people do — the things people often abandon in the name of marriage and family.

In a way, The Kids Are All Right picks up where Juno left off, showing us what happens to Bateman once he leaves his wife. The film gives us another cool-dude male — this one single — who makes inappropriate sexual decisions, gets punished, and eventually discarded by the film altogether. Ruffalo leads a low-stress life as a restaurant owner. He lives by the mantra of “chill.” He flirts and sleeps around, not contributing much to society, but not doing any damage to it either. The film feels he needs to grow up. He sleeps with a married woman (Julianne Moore, superb) and decides, rather abruptly, that he too wants to be married. So he latches on to her family; he decides that his previous content was superficial, incomplete. He decides, and the film suggests, that an unmarried male’s life is dictated by self-absorption and hedonism. On a long enough timeline, it seems, all men will realize that a fulfilling life requires a family. Organic farming and Joni Mitchell records will only get you so far. Annette Bening’s character says it for the filmmakers: ”You’re a fucking interloper. If you want a family so much, go out and make your own!”

Ruffalo hears that line, kicks a trash can, and disappears from the movie. Meanwhile, the film’s central couple goes on to resolve its issues. We get closing shots of the married couple (gay, by the way) locking hands while their son grins. It’s not wine-and-roses happy, but it’s far from ambiguous. The family will survive. Moore, the unfaithful wife, has learned her lesson. She’ll emerge stronger for it. But what of Ruffalo? Does he evolve, does he find peace? The film doesn’t care. We never see him again. He’s off the grid, outside of the family unit. The married woman receives forgiveness; the single man exits in shame.

Social conservatives argue gay marriage threatens our social bedrock. The Kids Are All Right seems to think the same thing about single men. As A. O. Scott noted in his initial review, “Nothing is more disruptive to domestic order than an unattached heterosexual man. In mid-19th-century America, anxiety about guys more or less like [Ruffalo] drove movements for social and religious reform, and [director Lisa] Cholodenko suggests that those advocates for temperance and other remedies may have had a point.” The film, clearly progressive in its same-sex politics, gestates from status-quo beliefs on the necessity of marriage. Without it, the movie argues, we’d have chaos — messy, hedonistic chaos. So Cholodenko does the logical thing: She punishes the character she paints as a threat to the institution.

(To be clear, everything about The Kids Are All Right, including the handling of this material, is more delicate than Juno. No one should mistake this analysis for equivalence. Yes, both film’s feel like refurbished after-school specials, complete with domestic moralizing. And yes, both tell gimmicky stories about pregnancy. But The Kids Are All Right isn’t “2010′s Juno.” I found the movie offensive, on a personal level, but that doesn’t deny the artistry with which it tells its story.)

There’s a thought I can’t escape. Perhaps these films hit me so hard because, in the end, they’re right. And I don’t want to believe them. I want to believe that a married man can befriend a teenage girl without turning into a creep. I want to believe that a single, adult male can lead a rewarding life. I want to believe that marriage, though pleasant for some, isn’t a necessary condition for happiness. I want to believe such necessary conditions don’t exist, that people can defy norms without feeling somehow incomplete. I want to believe those norms are arbitrary, that humans can challenge them and carve their own way, free of inertia. I want to blame our weaknesses on society, not humanity. But what if I’m wrong? What if people need rules — like marriage, like religion, like social norms — to keep them from acting on ugly impulses? What if men, being what they are, really shouldn’t befriend teenage girls — not just because society frowns upon it, but because they have a genuine tendency to let their instincts run wild? How the thought depresses me. To think, we’re so nefarious that we need artificial barriers just to protect us from ourselves! Maybe, in the end, these films work because they unnerve people like me.

Frenzied emotions, expressive costumes, booming musical cues — this is the stuff of cinematic melodrama. I eat it up. Frazzled minds were made for the movies. Melodrama, as a genre, lets filmmakers run wild. It lets gifted stylists visualize repression and festering anger with filmic flourishes. A boring melodrama has its characters mope and talk. An engaging one packs the screen with visual manifestations of those characters’ most primal instincts: jealousy, love, fury. In life, these things tend to simmer. In melodrama, they pop, like the red on James Dean’s jacket. You don’t win points for subtlety here.

Darren Aronofsky, the director who flogged us all with the acid-dipped D.A.R.E. shirt he called Requiem for a Dream, is up for this task. This guy only carries blunt instruments. His films hammer; they don’t scalpel. Aronofsky hails from the more-is-more school of filmmaking, which places a premium on viscera over intellect. As such, he tends to live in that ghetto critics call “style over substance.” But now he’s given us Black Swan, his most satisfying movie to date. This is a terrific film about the creative process — its paranoid rivalries and cycles of self-hatred — told with the broad, bold strokes of horror and melodrama.

Black Swan dives into the mind of an insecure perfectionist (Natalie Portman). I’ve known the type. To a large extent, I am the type. Portman doesn’t effuse raw talent. She can’t “lose herself” in “transcendent” moments of artistry, as her superior (Vincent Cassel) often notes. She’s too self-aware, too rigid. But she works harder than anyone. She compensates for natural skill with borderline unhealthy devotion. If ballet were an essay test, she’d be the girl with flashcards.

For Portman’s character, people like Lily (Mila Kunis) ruin everything. Kunis doesn’t have the dedication or the outward austerity. But she has “it.” Natural, nonchalant talent. She’s the type to throw things together in an hour, only to usurp your months of practice. All inspiration, little perspiration. She doesn’t need to rehearse and repeat — unlike you. Her raw skill, worst of all, only highlights your inadequacy. Kunis nails this role, playing a vicious version of her chilled-out Hawaiian from Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

I connected with Black Swan on a personal level, if you couldn’t tell. With everything I do (which includes writing this piece), I long for Kunis’ effortless style. Panache, gusto, grace — I want to embody these words. But I usually settle for stilted, over-rehearsed, Portman-like contortions. I am an over-thinker, incapable of “losing myself” in those mythical moments of transcendence. The instant such moments appear, they tend to dissipate. It’s like lucid dreaming; I just can’t do it. I recognize it’s happening, and I freeze.

For people like me (and Portman, who’s a much crazier case, thank you), few things trigger jealousy like a display of flamboyant, natural skill. I think: Why bother writing when someone with more instinctive gifts will always undercut anything I produce? Why spend hours massaging out sentences when some punchy blogger can double my word count with the flick of a wrist? And then I think about that. And then I think some more.

Black Swan captures what it feels like to fall down such rabbit holes of creative jealousy and self-loathing. It’s not a pleasant feeling, but it’s one ripe for cinematic picking. Aronofsky has a ball with it. He blends two genres almost defined by excess — horror and melodrama — into a funhouse of the torrid and lurid. The film takes its clear inspirations (Repulsion, Carrie, The Piano Teacher) and adds a schlocky sheen that borders on camp. For some, it’ll be too much. Portman’s ludicrous bedroom and the black-white costumes have all the subtlety of a moralistic silent film (white equals good! black equals bad!). For me, two of the film’s most remarkable qualities derive here: its otherworldly atmosphere and its sly lack of self-seriousness. Buried beneath the dread, body-horror, and sexual repression, Black Swan has real laughs. Consider the shock-cut during Portman’s masturbation scene or Kunis’ disarming aside about a “lezzie wet dream.”

I enjoyed Black Swan for the same reasons I smiled at Twilight: It uses cinematic means to explore a feeling. Those endless crane shots of Patt-Stew staring at each other in Twilight were silly, but they also got at the sensation of teen love, when emotions burst and the rest of the world disappears. Like that movie, Black Swan is beyond heavy-handed. But its overwrought tone jibes with the story, which seethes nothing but the heightened emotions of real life: mistrust, lust, frustration.

Finally, the film’s massive elephant: gender politics. What, if anything, does Black Swan say about patriarchy? For its entire runtime, we watch women literally break themselves to impress a man — Cassel. We also watch women act petty and hysterical. The film doesn’t seem to comment on any of this. And it lets Cassel off without any clear comeuppance. Is this wrong? I don’t know. But Aronofsky doesn’t portray the men in Black Swan with much sympathy. They all operate with varying degrees of sleaze (the clear winner being the lecherous subway man — Black Swan‘s “ass to ass!” moment, if you will). I’d be lying if I said I knew the answers after one viewing. The film didn’t offend me, however, because its nightmarish, fable-like tone distanced it from any real-world reading on gender. It stars a virginal damsel in distress. She stumbles into a haunted house. It’s filled with the ugly motivations of beautiful people. And so she escapes with a pirouette.

I think you were used to reading about yourself every time these “Black Actors at the Oscars” stories come up — I know how you feel and face it, they’re basically the equivalent of the “Abraham Lincoln: Still Dead” evergreen at this point — and noticed that your name was absent. What you didn’t do is read carefully enough to see that it was a stylistic choice and not an error or a mistatement of fact.

You think being left out of an article that wasn’t even about you is hard? Try having your most famous role be that of a slave. Now that’s hard! (Sorry to mimic Sue Sylvester but I just love “Glee,” though I wish they’d do more with Mercedes than make her a magical negro.)

Monday morning, you invoked my name in your rant about how the Times critics “dismissed” and “erased” your Oscar win. But I looked back at your old Oscar speech and you didn’t mention me at all. I don’t think it was on purpose. It was probably an oversight and not a callous attempt to dismiss the trail I blazed for you. How about this: I’d appreciate it if when you use my name to make a point, make sure the argument is about us and not you.

Whoopi, be glad they even let you be on TV. They let you have your own sitcom where you were a producer. I had my own sitcom, where I played a maid and had NO creative control. You were nominated for two Oscars, one of which you won. Your characters, Oda Mae Brown and Celie Johnson, each had more than one name, unlike mine (I’m not even sure Mammy was my character’s name, I think it was a title). You even got to host the Oscars — FOUR TIMES. Don’t forget, sweetheart: I didn’t even get to sit with my peers when I won the Oscar. I was seated in a segregated section.

And I know how far we’ve come. Listen, I’m really appreciative of all you’ve done to further black comedians (and comediennes) and all the progress you’ve made for black women in Hollywood. I watched you win your Oscar in 1991 with tears in my eyes, the precipitation of pride. And even though you’re not really acting anymore — though I howl with laughter each and every time I see you on “30 Rock” — I still have great fondness for you. You’re out there being positive, outspoken and thoughtfully advocating for others and the causes you believe in, no matter how much trouble it gets you into.

Whoopi, you are a gift. You are my heir in so many ways. You didn’t have to play the slave. You got your Oscar — and a well-deserved nomination — by playing characters far more empowered, fleshed-out and independent than I had the luxury of playing, than I ever could have dreamed of being able to play. So why are you tainting your legacy with this hissy fit?

Myself and Mo'Nique on the nights of our Oscar wins. (Image from freckledcitizen.com)

I don’t think you missed the point on purpose. My guess is that you’ve taken your eye off the ball. I’m not dumb; I know there are still so many struggles black women — whether in the home or Hollywood — have to endure. I know many of us are still heading households alone, and have limited access to healthcare and a long way until we reach pay equity. And it breaks my heart to see that, 20 years after your Academy Award triumph and one year after the lovely Mo’Nique paid tribute to me as she won the very same Oscar that I received, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has taken a significant slide backward with the whitest Oscars (in acting) in 10 years. You should be mad. We should all, regardless of race, be mad. But somehow, in your comments yesterday, that didn’t appear to be the source of your frustration. You invoked my name and made it about you. You said “it hurt me terribly.” You said “it’s hard not to take it personally.” And when you shifted the focus from the drought of Oscar-worthy and Academy-noticed roles for Blacks in Hollywood to yourself, you also took the attention of your hundreds of thousands of viewers — the people who can help make a difference — with you.

But Whoopi, it’s not about you. It’s not even about me, Denzel, Halle, A.O. Scott or Manohla Dargis. It’s about mankind’s collective struggle toward equality, a fight played out in the microcosm of Black Hollywood. It’s about the work we still have to do and how frustrating it is that after all the progress we’ve made, some days we wake up to find we’re still Sisyphus.

So Whoopi, I don’t mind you screaming from your soapbox about your causes and your feelings. And I’ll always be proud of all you’ve achieved — proud enough to even forgive you for “Eddie.” But the next time you trot out that little gold statuette, the one you worked so hard to earn, the one denied to so many people who looked like us and may have even deserved it more that we did, make sure you raise that Oscar with the weight of Black Hollywood’s legacy and not your own ego. I promise more people will take your protest seriously if you do.

*Hattie McDaniel, as you may know or have guessed, spun off this mortal coil long ago. So you’ve found out our secret: Ms. McDaniel did not, I repeat, did NOT actually write this letter. We used her persona for satire. Cool?

With the sad announcement of author Brian Jacques’ sudden death on Feb. 5, I want to take a moment to thank Mr. Jacques for all he’s done for me. I know, maybe it’s a little corny but as an English major and aspiring authoress in possession of a vivid imagination since age two, I can’t help it.

Brian Jacques, author of 21 Redwall books, was 71 when he passed away on Feb. 5.

Jacques, author of the famed Redwall series, was my first real introduction to the fantasy genre. His books came out around the time my dad started reading The Hobbit to me every night before I went to bed. I like to think these two things are the reason I even had an imagination as a kid at all, but maybe that’s just me being dramatic.

Redwall, the tale of the creatures that inhabit Mossflower woods, was really the first book I ever remember creating my own stories with. Luckily, I have a best friend who also became absorbed in the series when I did, so through joint efforts we were able to bring Basil Stag Hare, Martin the Warrior, and Constance the Badger to life. I remember spending hours making up new adventures for our favorite characters in what can only be described as a child’s version of fan fiction.

Now, this borderline embarrassing retelling of my wacky (but supremely real) childhood is meant to do more than make my friends realize why I now sport of a Lord of the Rings-inspired tattoo. My purpose is so much greater—just as Jacques’ Redwall series was so much more than a simple story. What Jacques did for me, and I’m sure for countless others, was provide something to be passionate about at a very young age: reading. It’s simple really, but it’s something I’m afraid is becoming lost in favor of television (though that, in its own way, is also an important medium to consume).

My best friend and I used this very Beanie Baby to depict Basil Stag Hare. Wot wot?

As a kid, I was lucky enough to have parents who would read to me every night before I went to bed — a tradition that I think shaped my interests greatly and led me down the path I’m on now. We read everything from Harry Potter to the Lord of the Rings andBeverly Cleary to Roald Dahl. If I’m remembering correctly, Jacques’ novels were some of the first ones I read on my own (after The Baby-sitters Club but before Little House on the Prairie), and ultimately that series is one that has stuck with me for years — maybe because it was imprinted so vividly in my mind.

I’ve sometimes come off as a book snob because I can’t help but be taken aback by people who say they hate literature. I just don’t understand it — I grew up an avid reader. Stories are the foundation for everything and books have the ability to give people something to disappear into for a while.

Jacques' seminal novel "Redwall."

I like to think that even without Jacques I would have dedicated years to books, but I think my world was so much richer with his stories in it. Jacques created this place with mice and badgers and rabbits conquering evil and fighting for the good of animalkind and created a product that was almost a child’s version of Lord of the Rings, a story so powerful in its own right that it affected each and every person who read it. Whether that effect was teaching some readers that the fantasy genre wasn’t their thing or whether it was like what happened to me — exposure to a genre that I could connect to, recreate, and tell my own stories with.

Brian Jacques taught me so much about what it takes to create compelling literature — lessons I didn’t realize as a child but lessons that I hold onto now and will continue to hold onto for years to come, regardless of if he’s no longer creating works of fiction.

I can only hope that just because we lost a literary master doesn’t mean we’re going to lose the influence his books had on readers. I hope that if you read Jacques as a child, you’ll realize the importance of his work and pass it down to any adolescent you know. The most important thing for kids in this ever-changing world of technology and television is that they get to keep their imaginations.

We’re back folks. The ArtSTALK staff is back to snark on celebrities tonight, only this time the musically inclined are in our sights. Beginning today at 7 p.m., Managing Editor Meryn Fluker will live blog/live Tweet the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards, which will be broadcast on CBS.

We will once again present tonight’s live chat through COVERITLIVE, which means you don’t need a Twitter account to participate in ArtSTALK’s Grammy festivities. All you need to do is show up and comment. We’re not like the the Plastics, we want everyone to sit at our collective lunch table. So pull up a chair and join in with your own questions and quips regarding tonight’s ceremony.

B.o.B. is just one of the nominees at tonight's Grammy Awards. Will he win? If so, will he re-enact this photo with his statuette? (Photo courtesy of Grammy.com)

Click below to get started and don’t be shy: Meryn and the rest of the ArtSTALK crew (possibly with some special guests) are eager to read your reactions to the event billed as “Music’s Biggest Night.”

Amid the hullabaloo surrounding Rihanna’s “S&M,” I’ve learned something valuable: It’s totally OK for women to make sexual music, as long as our sexuality doesn’t venture into the “extreme.”

The ball gag-, whip-, chain- and latex-laden “S&M” music video is a poppy portrait of sadomasochism, a la Rihanna. She walks Perez Hilton on a leash like her sex-slave man-dog. She rolls around on the ground with her hair in pigtails while sporting a pastel leotard, bound in ropes. She carries a whip. She wears a latex headpiece.

The song and the video have been heavily censored on radio stations, on YouTube (which placed an age restriction on the video) and in countries that refuse to be infiltrated by Rihanna’s depravity.

Rihanna will whip your ass into shape like the dom she is. (Image from NYDailyNews.com.)

Plagiarism accusations aside, the video and the song are pretty inoffensive. The most salacious lyrics read:

Cause I may be bad, but I’m perfectly good at it
Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But chains and whips excite me

Maybe I’ve been desensitized to sex on the radio after growing up on a music diet based largely on rap songs, but I can’t see what the problem is. The song is catchy and mainstream – my Zumba instructor lip-synched the words while we warmed up to it at the start of class today – and other (mostly male) artists have never gotten so much slack for their similarly sexy lyrics.

: Why is it R Right for Trina and Ludacris to sing dirty, but not Rihanna? (Image from Dyfuse.com.)

Exhibit B: Trina and Ludacris, “B R Right.” Unlike Rihanna’s vague lyrics in “S&M,” Trina and Luda explicitly outline… a lot of things. The link above leads to the song’s official music video, which features a very diluted version of the original song. You can read the uncensored lyrics here (NSFW NSFW!!!11!!).

Both “Choke Me Spank Me” and “B R Right” have lyrics that are not only lewd but also highly specific in their sexual imagery. I could link to three billion more songs that paint similarly crude portraits of carnality, but you get the idea. In a nutshell: Rihanna says she likes S&M; Trina says she wants her “ass smacked, legs wide, pussy wet, slip ‘n slide.” But wow, that Rihanna, she’s a real deviant!

Maybe if all children were required to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about shocking and offending their young, tender senses. (Image from Snakerati.com.)

Although I understand YouTube’s decision to slap an age restriction on “S&M,” I don’t think the video is the most traumatizing visual experience a child could have. But maybe I am entirely immune to visual sex in pop culture as well – my mom left the TV set on VH1 one day when I was in fourth grade. There was a Rocky Horror Picture Showmarathon playing all day. After entering into the hypersexual world of Dr. Frank-n-Furter at the age of 9, not much since then has ruffled my feathers in the way of sexuality. Plus, adding the age restriction will only pique the interest of young viewers and adults alike. The video has gotten over 10 million views in less than two weeks.

Ultimately, if Rihanna’s intention is to shock and offend, it’s not working on many of us. But I don’t think that’s her objective. The song is catchy, it’s honest, it functions mostly as an analogy for her relationship with the press and she’s not describing something so sexually wayward that it should make the rest of us blush. Rihanna is an adult with a fan base that includes men, women, teens, tweens and maybe even babies. “S&M” is on par with songs like Britney Spears’ “Touch of My Hand” (an homage to masturbation) and “Phonography” (in praise of phone sex). Hell, even *NSYNC had a song about cyber sex – remember that?

Maybe “S&M” won’t make the next volume of Kidz Bop, but who said Rihanna’s music has to be PG? Who wants to listen to a song called “Missionary Position,” or “Ways I Pleasure Men”? There’s already a surplus of songs like that, but it seems that’s the only way female artists are allowed to be sexual. I tip my latex hat to Rihanna for singing frankly about what gets her off, even if it involves role-playing with Perez Hilton, which wouldn’t really do it for me.

]]>https://uiartstalk.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/sm-is-a-ok/feed/8alg_rihanna_smtokeneditrixalg_rihanna_smtrina-ft-ludacris-work-for-itrocky-horrorF.A.M.E. and SNLhttps://uiartstalk.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/f-a-m-e-and-snl/
https://uiartstalk.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/f-a-m-e-and-snl/#respondSun, 13 Feb 2011 01:02:06 +0000http://uiartstalk.wordpress.com/?p=749Chris Brown’s career was declared dead two years ago. But tonight, he takes the “Saturday Night Live” stage with two Top 20 singles and three Grammy nominations. Is it forgive-and-forget time for him?

Though Brown’s 2009 release Graffitifinds itself sitting on two Grammy nominations (with a third for his work on the collab track “Deuces”), he’s been largely absent from the music scene since the assault. Graffiti’s debut single “I Can Transform Ya” failed to make a significant impact, and comes across as rather soulless – perhaps not the best impression for Chris to lead off a comeback with.

While the lyrics of “I Can Transform Ya” are addressed to a prospective paramour, the video is almost entirely devoid of women, favoring instead to feature pieces of machinery and dancers clad in what appear to be SWAT uniforms. “Crawl,” another Graffiti single, takes the opposite tact, with Brown pleading for forgiveness from an unnamed female starlet, not that that means anything, obviously.

The “Crawl” video: Symbolism? What symbolism?

In the interim since Graffiti’s debut, radio hasn’t wanted for male pop/R&B/dance artists – we’ve had Taio Cruz and Jason Derülo to fill the void, not to mention the massive successes from Chris Brown’s earlier self, Usher. “I Can Transform Ya” was OK, but “OMG” and “DJ Got Us Falling In Love” are the tracks that get people on the dance floor.

This is all without mentioning the obvious: While Chris’ position in the music scene remains in question, Rihanna has scored nothing but hits from 2009’s Rated R onward. Tomorrow night seems guaranteed to see “Love The Way You Lie,” her abusive-relationship cautionary tale with Eminem, walk away with at least one award in its five nominated categories. The collision is nothing if not poetic.

When it comes to violent assault, Brown is in fairly notable company, both musical and otherwise. While Charlie Sheen’sexploits remain in the public eye, there are numerous musicians who’ve faced assault charges – from Jay-Z to Amy Winehouse. But these incidents have largely been dropped from public discussion – Winehouse seems unable to make rational decisions much of the time, and the man Hov was accused of stabbing was a little-known record executive, so who cares? Sean Penn has had a number of dust-ups, but he’s talented enough that public discussion of him still focuses on his acting.

Just because the Simpsons hang out with him doesn’t make James Brown a role model, kids. (Thanks to morethings.com)

The age-old conundrum of “art vs. artist” rears its head, this time complicated by timing. James Brown beat women, without question. But most of us learned this after we were exposed to the Godfather of Soul’s best work – even at a young age, “I Feel Good” has seeped into our minds via its use in montages and trailers throughout the ages. Meanwhile, Brown’s outburst occurred on the heels of his most successful album to date. Even those who don’t like him may have been won over by his music being used in weddings real and fictional. (The couple in the “Forever” wedding video have used their internet celebrity to fundraise for a domestic abuse charity, tellingly.)

It’s impossible to say whether Graffiti is the album Brown would have released had the February 2009 assault not happened, but gauging from “Yeah 3X,” he seems eager to leave its chilly electro sound and return to the days of “Run It!” The song is buoyant and club-ready, complete with a chorus that’s made for fist-pumping. It’s the fraternal twin of “Dynamite,” both of which are cousins to “DJ Got Us Falling In Love,” so it’s difficult to imagine having a preference for one over the other two, which is perhaps the genius behind “Yeah 3X” in the first place.

The unconscious choice seems to be: Do you enjoy Brown’s work pre-violence only, or can the “love the music, hate the musician” mentality continue into “Yeah 3X” (a song I’ll admit to singing along to in the car), his F.A.M.E. album and beyond? So far, the consensus seems to be, “Well, how good is the music?” Once Chris Brown attempts a full-fledged return to the spotlight, beginning tonight and extending to the March 22 album release date, audiences will finally have a better answer to the latter – and a significant guess as to the former.

Tonight, a meteorite carrying alien bacteria will slam into a junk yard, bringing to life a giant metal monster that will go on a killing spree and bring our planet to its knees.

But no big deal – it was only two weeks ago that exploding pythons and alligators surging with steroids were hell-bent on terrorizing the Florida Everglades, and we got through it – with the help of ‘80s teen pop sensations Tiffany and Debbie Gibson.

So this evening, we can relax: It will just be another Syfy Saturday night.

For a 16-year-old cable property once best known for airing “Battlestar Galactica” and reruns of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Syfy has taken significant strides in the past few years to distance itself from its fanboys-only viewer base in hopes of reaching a broader audience. Although the network was one of NBCUniversal’s most reliable entities, ranking fifteenth among basic cable channels in adults 18-49 and eighth in adults 25-54, Syfy President Dave Howe saw the original “Sci Fi” moniker as a hindrance to future expansion (indeed, when most basic cablers saw ratings growth in 2009, the science fiction network had basically none).

Viewers may have initially ridiculed the network’s decision in 2009 to rebrand the Sci Fi Channel as the phonetically identical “Syfy,” but the effort has ushered in a successful programming and publicity metamorphosis. Armed with the tagline “Imagine Greater,” Syfy has not only expanded the range of its science fiction offerings (it now includes fantasy, horror, paranormal, supernatural, mystery and action/adventure under its genre umbrella, as well as new original scripted and reality-based shows), it’s building its reputation as Syfy Ventures, a business portfolio that includes five consumer sub-brands: Syfy Games, Syfy Films, Syfy Kids, Syfy Gear and Syfy Digital.

Rocking a concert in front of the entire student body is way cooler than having two Fendi purses and a silver Lexus.

For the past six months, each SyFy original movie has raked in at least two million viewers, including August’s Lake Placid 3 (3.0 million), and the affectionately mocked Sharktopus (2.5 million) in September. Last month, Syfy viewership increased 10 percent among adults 18-34, credited to ratings behemoths like Gatoroid, as well as rising viewership for “WWE Friday Night Smackdown” and the launches of two new series – the scripted supernatural drama “Being Human” and the special effects makeup reality competition “Face Off.”

For Syfy president Howe, it’s not surprising that the network’s guilty pleasure films have cultivated a loyal audience – in an era of disappointing multi-billion-dollar epic fantasies and superhero adventures (think last year’s Prince of Persia: Sands of Time), campy B-movies are a welcome change of tone. “‘It’s about letting escapist entertainment wash over you,’” Howe said to the New York Times. “‘These are fun and easy Saturday night, put-your-feet-up, don’t-think-too-much movies.’”

Times entertainment business reporter Brooks Barnes similarly credits the popularity of movies like Gatoroid to “a simple case of supply and demand.” Syfy’s Saturday-night films recall the B-movie “creature features” that once dominated both television and the cinema throughout the 1960s and ’70s, but disappeared from the entertainment landscape when film rights became more expensive and viewing habits shifted away from Saturday night. But with new B-movies like Dimension Films’ 2010 release Piranha 3D making almost $80 million at the global box office, and Saturday nights now ripe for the television audience-taking (ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX almost exclusively air reruns), a market for the low-rent creature features of old still clearly exists.

Whatever happened to Saturday night B-movies? Well, Syfy's going to make us pay for them now.

Whether Syfy’s Saturday night success will translate to the big screen with Syfy Films is another story.

Part of the made-for-TV movie charm is the cheesy special effects necessitated by small budgets (Syfy spends $2 million on each film according to Barnes’ piece), which television viewers accept in exchange for the free at-home showing. But bigger budgets may build audience expectations, and it will certainly take more marketing dollars to coerce crowds to leave the comfort of their homes to spend $10 at their local movie theaters. In short, there’s a greater risk of investment for viewers at the cinema, and the next Gatoroid and Sharktopus knock-offs may not inspire a B-movie box office renaissance.

However, if Syfy Films can secure stable, innovative production companies to breathe new life into the genre (no working relationships with production firms have yet been announced), the success of Piranha 3D may be able to be replicated – or even surpassed.

This image from cellulord.blogspot.com illuminates the shallow truth about 3D films.

Ultimately, a solid creative team will need to be established to craft and choose tales that remain true to Syfy’s Saturday night movie brand promise (campy fantasy fun), but are also able to generate enough consumer interest to cultivate an audience motivated to spend its hard-earned dollars for a big screen experience. Shooting in 3D a la Piranha may prove a vital component (i.e. marketing gimmick) in this regard.

Whatever the strategy, Syfy Films must construct a method to create consumer value above and beyond what its cable parent company can promise. If it can’t, Syfy Films will be doomed to fail.

After all, why buy the cow – steroid-pumped or otherwise – when you can get its radioactive milk for free?